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I am not a fan of "only 1 level in Burning Spears". Anyone care to explain me the theory-work behind making it such a *good* idea?

Anyone can feel free to correct this, because I'm just shooting from the hip here and have only been playing for a few months...

While I was referencing a guide site on my first Huskar play, I did put additional levels into Burning Spear in the late game. That was pretty much because I had nowhere but attributes to put it in, though. It did more damage then, but it never seemed to amount to what other heroes were doing. My guess as to why they recommend 1 pt: While it might not be a complete waste, it's also not a top-tier attack modifier like Clinkz, Drow or Silencer have. Plus, they recommend going for lifesteal thru Helm of the Dominator, and the extra skill points help you raise other abilities faster. Just a guess.

Can't pure support because carries fail, can't carry because (I suck at carrying) enemy team has more carries, can't strat team composition because "I play for fun" and "for mother russia", can't initiate because nobody commits, can't push because game is suddenly about killing people and not winning.

/rant

I feel you my good man, I feel you, I'm also mainly a 3-4-5 guy. I don't know what gamemode you usually play, but I'm personally fond of Single Draft. While there are idiots everywhere, it feels to me like they're a bit less present in SD, without going to the ridiculousness that can come forth from All Random.

Originally Posted by UrQuan

I am not a fan of "only 1 level in Burning Spears". Anyone care to explain me the theory-work behind making it such a *good* idea?

I think it's because it's an orb, which can be used to overpower certain disables (like Crystal Maiden's Frostbite) and can make you a more capable harasser at low level, depending on the enemy lane. But it's also kinda shitty, hence why only 1 point.

Burning Spears is an Orb (Like Drows frost arrows), you can use this bully your lane alot. For those that don't know what is special about an Orb attack over a normal attack:

Lane creeps will attack you if you auto attack to harass an enemy champion, this is all creeps within (off the top of my head) around 600 range, infact they will agro you as soon as you right click the enemy champion (let this be a lesson with a melee hero to right click the ground and walk up to the enemy before attacking them so you don't tank lane creeps on the way there as well as the way back). INFACT they will attack you even if the champion you right click is on another lane (great for Axe may I add if you want to clear a creep wave but the enemy creeps already have their targets. Lane creeps do not care about you casting spells on the enemy though (They look at you and think "Screw that, that guy just made lightning fly out of his hands, I didn't sign up for any of that... I'll just sit here swishing my sword).

Now Orb attacks are an "enhancement" of your normal auto attack, they are generally (I think off the top of my head, always) a unique modifier. They can be Autocast by right clicking the spell or they can be manually cast like any normal spell.

Autoattacking with your Orb attack on Autocast is no different to normally auto attacking, the game treats it no different so you end up agroing creeps, on the other end of this you can (at least later in the game) auto attack faster than you can manually spam the spell.

However and this is the important bit, if you manually cast the Orb attack on each hit at the enemy your fine, you as far as the creeps are concerned cast a spell, this is why it works from within CM's frostbite too, you can cast spells in that so its fine with you manually casting the Orb spell. If you and an enemy go toe to toe early game and they are tanking 3-4 lane creeps while you are not you essentially are getting a big fat DPS increase. It's almost always advisable to get at least 1 level in any orb, usually at lvl 1, its just that powerful to be able to harass an enemy with no comebacks from lane creep agro.

Huskar's Orb, Burning Spears isn't that bad of an Orb at all, early game if you can stack 3-4 of these on 1 guy he's taking alot of dmg, like... ALOT of dmg, it hurts, and you can do this quite safely standing beside his creeps while they hit your lane creeps, if he hits back your creeps will run at him like he insulted their mums (And what a mum they must have to spit out 4-5 babies every 30 seconds... classy lady).

So I hear you saying "But DenieD, why would I not level the Orb then it sounds soooo good?", well simply put, it's great in a lane but later on its not that good, your much MUCH better with life steal, with your attack speed and dmg passive from losing HP its not uncommon to see Huskar reach a point where without some sort of CC your enemy just can't out dps his life leech and when they realise this its far to late and they are very dead. Why's it not great? Well essentially because you want a fight to happen and you do a tonne of dmg and kill everyone then go Rax them, you don't want 2 guys on the enemy team maybe burning to death (if they have no heals or half decent regen) 10 seconds after they have murdered all of your guys, especially if they focus you. It's the same reason that Venomancers passive is evil early game but late game no one really cares about being hit by Venomancer.

Also this is a reason that good Drow players (not that you have to be good to get ridiculous kills with Drow :P) will usually get a satanic later on (Helm of the Dominator earlier on) and manage their casts of Frost Arrows, you can kite someone with it so they can't get away from you, they can't get to you but if you take dmg you can life steal it all back.

TL;DR - It's powerful early game but you would be 100x better taking lifesteal later on and they don't work together, also his passive is the primary leveling skill because its stupidly evil.

DenieD, that was a very thorough, contextual guide - thank you! I am wondering if you could devise a case where a 3- or 4-stack of Burning Spears would be worth the tradeoffs; as you say, lifesteal can be purchased later and would displace the burning effect. Do you see a viable "Burning Huskar" build, perhaps with a change in the meta?

Played Lifestealer in my coop bot lunch match. Our team completely fell apart in most teamfights, probably due to them having Luna, Sven and Earthshaker together to coordinate stuns + nukes, but still. We had a long loss that took almost an hour. Kinda disappointing, even tho the first half of the game went fine. I'd say our main downfall, aside from bad teamfight work, was not pushing to their base soon enough. We got complacent about halfway thru when things were looking good.

Anyway, I liked LS. Open Wounds is a great snare, and Rage pairs well with an armlet. I don't think I was very good at utilizing his Infest ultimate. I mean, it seemed to do a reasonable amount of damage at level 3, but they were too fed at that point for it to lead to much. Add in Luna spam, illusions and your teammates freaking out, and you end up feeling pretty futile.

Not LS's fault, though... I see him as a good hero that I played *alright* but not great. Not bad for a first time, though, and the ~hour match gave me plenty of practice with his abilities to be making reliable kills by the end. Just not when they Luna 5-man spam. I will notmiss that when I finish playing all heroes in coop bot.

Infest is, I think, best used when you need to heal in the middle of a teamfight if there are creeps nearby, or if there are no creeps, you can try to infest a teammate that is very likely to escape the fight and have him carry you inside.
Also very useful to infest a ganking or high mobility hero (Bounty Hunter, Riki, Nyx Assassin, Nightstalker, Spirit Breaker, Storm Spirit, blablabla...), have him carry you to the target enemy hero and then "SURPRISE BUTT SEX", A.K.A. "Naix bomb" (because LS's name is Naix).

Infest is, I think, best used when you need to heal in the middle of a teamfight if there are creeps nearby, or if there are no creeps, you can try to infest a teammate that is very likely to escape the fight and have him carry you inside.
Also very useful to infest a ganking or high mobility hero (Bounty Hunter, Riki, Nyx Assassin, Nightstalker, Spirit Breaker, Storm Spirit, blablabla...), have him carry you to the target enemy hero and then "SURPRISE BUTT SEX", A.K.A. "Naix bomb" (because LS's name is Naix).

Well now I feel dumb. I didn't even try it on allied heroes. Nice idea.

Also, unless I'm mistaken, Rage should make you immune to Luna's ult.

Hrm, you're right. Double dumb for me. I was pairing it with the armlet to double up on effects, but saving it as a free BKB+ makes sense. While I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have won that game for us, I'm sure that timing that would've helped. The more you know!

All of this makes me want to play LS again the next time I'm online, but that goes against finishing my unplayed hero goal. Nine more to go.

I'll try to conceive a situation where 2-4 levels in burning spears is wanted, tbh its hard to do just because if you are spamming that fast in a team fight the enemy won't even need to hit you, you'll kill yourself lol. Possibly paired with quite a fat Wisp that could heal you ALOT in the fight and give you Overpower. Leave that one with me.

Lifestealer is really good, check out the Puppeh play of him in Navi's matches, I think thats about the best play I've seen of him lately. He's currently quite heavily in the meta game at competative level because Chaos Knight + Wisp used to be the global ganking + carry combo but it gets banned alot, Life Stealer can infest a Natures Prophet and get a free ride anywhere on the map.

Rage wise, well its a huge attack speed increase and also a free BKB, nothing to be sniffed at there, if they have a heavy magic dmg or CC team don't feel buying a BKB and popping it after Rage is a bad thing, its perfectly viable. Open wounds is a great snare as you say and also gives alot of Lifesteal even for Magic attacks (its always fun to Lina Ulti an enemy with it on as you get a nice heal out of it ). Naix really comes into his own with his passive tbh, its great especially vs any high hp heroes, just be aware that as their hp decreases so does you lifesteal and your dmg. Ulti-wise, its primarily used for a Naix delivery system but can be used to escape by jumping in an enemy lane creep thats full hp or an ally with stealth etc... situational though.

Meepo+Vlads can solo Roshan. Get a blink dagger and get good at tab-selecting to telefrag people like Quake. Anything tanky makes you much harder to kill and you can get XP globally if you get good at watching all your Meepos and teleporting them out.

OK Some theory crafting for X_kot (PS this will be a definate long post, nothing I can do about it lol)

Theres alot of assumptions here and I did it using Dota2 Wiki and Calc on my work PC so this is subject to alot of iffiness but bare with me:

Assumptions

The enemy has 0 armour 0 magic armour... (Obviously this is untrue as you start with magic armour and almost all heroes will have physical armour of some type by lvl 7; it just makes stuff messy though).

They have no evade skill and have normal sort of lvl 7 items, boots or something but nothing special (Their not popping a Pipe or a Mek or anything).

You have a base dmg average of 80.

Scenario

The enemy has just been in a fight with someone where they are full hp, they are a lvl 7 hero and so are you, they have all their spells on CD so they can't do anything other than auto attack but I won't really take their dmg into the equations.

The fight starts with them running back from a fight and you Ulti'ing them, taking them down to 50% hp, for arguements sake we'll say you weren't full hp and are now on 50% yourself. You now have 3 seconds to kill them before we'll say they get to safety (Tower, Team Mate... Blink comes off CD.. whatever).

Your on 50% hp, that gives you +18% attack speed and +12 dmg from Bz Blood.
With this lets assume Huskar gets 1 hit after the ulti in the first second, 2 in the 2nd second and 1 in the 3rd as they get away, I'm not sure this 18% attack speed bonus would break the 1 attack a second threshold but we'll be kind. Essentially the fight for this will be: Ulti-1hit-2hit-1hit-enemy gone.

75 self dmg should be accounted for here from spears too but we'll ignore it since both builds get it.

Burning spears will do 512 dmg over the fight (1stack-3stacks-4stacks---7seconds duration after the 4th attack).
You will hit for (80+12)*4 additional to the burn dmg... thats 368 so total not including the ulti its 880 dmg.

Your on 50% hp, that gives you +72% attack speed and +48 dmg from Bz Blood.
With this lets assume Huskar gets 1 hit after the ulti in the first second, 2 in the 2nd second and 2 in the 3rd as they get away... I give 1 more attack in this build as you have ALOT more attack speed, I think it might even be enough to get 3 hits in the 2nd second but I'm being fair here. Essentially the fight for this will be: Ulti-1hit-2hit-2hit-enemy gone.

Burning spears will do 156 dmg over the fight (1stack-3stacks-5stacks---7seconds duration after the 5th attack).
You will hit for (80+48)*5 additional to the burn dmg... thats 640 so total not including the ulti its 796 dmg.

----

Summary

Ok so on the face of it it definately looks like Build 1 wins here, some things to think about though... the 7 seconds duration of burn dmg is countered to a degree by regen. The burn is also countered by the standard magic armour you get but almost all heroes start with low armour and don't really gain much by lvl 7.

Area's Build 1 Wins Out: The 7 second burn duration really helps it here, all the dmg is in that bit. Essentially you've done your dmg at 10 seconds after you ulti'd them. The longer the fight continues without you getting hit and you stacking on them the longer your dmg goes up, it literally goes insane when you get alot of stacks on people (7 stacks burning for 7 seconds is 784 dmg).

Negative Build 1 Points: The kill isn't certain, the first 3 seconds dmg isn't really good enough to say "yup their definately dead", theres alot that could go wrong here, if they manage to blink to an omniknight for instance a repel will ssave them let alone the heal. You can't have lifesteal for the game because your entire build revolves around throwing burning spears in people faces. Your next levels in the build would be to take Bz Blood leaving you with lvl 1 heal.

Area's Build 2 Wins Out: You are front loading over 650 dmg on the enemy in 3 seconds (not including the ulti)... if they have under 1200 max hp (lvl 7 they should have under that lol) they are very dead. If they turn to hit you then you will gain more attack speed and dmg... insane amounts (e.g. at 3% hp - yeh I know but roll with me here - you will gain 168 attack speed and 112 attack damage). You can get an attack modifier and your game plan is a sum total of - HIT PEOPLE. The next levels in the build will be in the heal, giving you greater survivability and utility.

Negative Build 2 Points: The burn dmg is really nothing special, if it wasn't an Orb I'd never ever bother taking it. If they get away alive they are probably staying that way.

I'll probably work left to right across the hero map and play Invoker last.

My opinion on this would be leave Meepo and Invoker to last. Invoker is tough, Meepo is micro-manage city; theres a fun build with a blink dagger meepo though .

Nightstalker - Mid lane, it all revolves around your ganking on your first night cycle, if it goes well you will snowball madly, if it doesn't you'll be a less than scary "thing".

Doom - Farm yourself to death and eat a Wolf Commander (You get +30% dmg aura and built in crit if you do).

Spirit Breaker - Most new people love.

Lycan - Since his nerf hes alot harder to play well, his role changes in the game alot; early hes a jungler, mid hes a pusher, late hes a juggernaut eating people alive.

Spectre - Farm, Farm, Farm, feel really weak (use your ulti to get assist gold when people on your team gank etc)... then all of a sudden turn into this unkillable death machine.

Meepo - As said above (Auras and Stat items are your friend, don't be afraid to build him a Mek).

Medusa - Farm dependant hero, the snake is awesome if you use it well and once you have a Linkens farm an MKB and you will be doing alot of dmg in team fights.

Bane - People think Anti-Mage is "Anti-Fun"... no it's Bane - for the enemy, the hero that can say "your not moving, your not moving, your not hitting for ANY dmg" to 3 people on the enemy team. If they have an auto attack heavy mid carry Bane will stop them last hitting and ruin their game.

Invoker - Highest skill ceiling in the game, if the enemy random him laugh.. if the enemy pick him worry.

Good stuff, DenieD - the fire build looks like it depends on too many factors to work consistently, especially at higher levels of play. It's hard to argue against massive damage upfront + lifesteal. Btw, do you cast or pro play? I enjoy listening to people like Purge commentate on DOTA games while I'm working since I don't have much free time to play at night.

I played competitive Dota1 (a tiny bit) and I'm currently in the amateur Dota2 Absolute Bedlam tourni with Tom O'Bedlam etc...

I've just played alot of Dota (too much :P). If you want to see some good amateur play its definately worth watching and most of the games aren't what you would call low skill level for an amateur tourni.

I played Nightstalker in today's lunch co-op game. I don't think I did particularly well, but it could've been much worse. Someone else had Medusa, so I couldn't mid lane. My start of game bottom rune fight with CK was a sign of things to come, because he got away with just a sliver of hp. That happened at least 4x in this game for me. My first night cycle led to another fleeing CK and then two other kills. They came and killed me at the end of night, tho. So the whole game was pretty much a series of victories followed by being ganked. We won in ~30mins, so it was an OK game despite that.

I played Nightstalker in today's lunch co-op game. I don't think I did particularly well, but it could've been much worse. Someone else had Medusa, so I couldn't mid lane. My start of game bottom rune fight with CK was a sign of things to come, because he got away with just a sliver of hp. That happened at least 4x in this game for me. My first night cycle led to another fleeing CK and then two other kills. They came and killed me at the end of night, tho. So the whole game was pretty much a series of victories followed by being ganked. We won in ~30mins, so it was an OK game despite that.

Out of interest - Have you played with a full multiplayer game yet, or are you playing every hero first?

I represent a shadowy organisation known only as "Sekrit". You may be familiar with some of our work through our propaganda arm, JiiiiimProductions on The Youtubes. We have been on an epic journey through Dota 2, having braved the perils of the low priority queue, the uncertainty of the Chinese and Russian language game options, the thrill of opponents unpausing during reconnects and reaped the rewards of the random item box drop, we felt it was time that our hand was revealed to the rest of the world.

We are here for some dotes.

I have gathered together possibly the finest group of dota players this planet has never seen. With over 15 of us we are a fearful group. At least one of us played the original dota. I myself once played a game almost an hour and a half long. One of us has played Meepo.

We wondered whether you would be interested in us organizing some inter-forum dotage, 5v5, last man standing, no Dry Rangers allowed.

Dare you accept the challenge?

TLR - you guys have an active DOTA2 community, we have an active one, if you fancy some moderately organised captain's mode games organise yourselves and let me know; we'll try to set up some times. PM or Steam (BBC Co-Prophet of the End Times).

We have quite a mixed level of abilities, but none of us would be outside the "normal" category, so we scale into the sub-categories of that (including complete n00b).

Out of interest - Have you played with a full multiplayer game yet, or are you playing every hero first?

I've played a handful of single draft games. Maybe five? Both losses were due to players afking or dropping out after ~10mins, making it uneven. Out of the 3 wins I have, I think only one of them had all 10 players when it finished. That's kind of frustrating, but I'm usually playing with a RL friend over voice chat and that makes it more fun.

I played Doom this morning. He was a lot of fun and I found his skills to all be pretty useful. On top of that, you have the passive or active abilities from Devoured neutral creeps. I did pretty well and we beat the bots in under half an hour. When I play him again, though, I will definitely Devour skill-less creeps after finding ones that's already given me useful abilities. That way, I can utilize that skill for more money & xp than I did the first time. (evidently, the Devouring of a non-skill/aura creep means you don't lose previously acquired ones)

7 heroes to go. Co-op bot games may not be the fastest, but they're easy for me to fit into my random playing schedule.

I've played a handful of single draft games. Maybe five? Both losses were due to players afking or dropping out after ~10mins, making it uneven. Out of the 3 wins I have, I think only one of them had all 10 players when it finished. That's kind of frustrating, but I'm usually playing with a RL friend over voice chat and that makes it more fun.

I was just wondering because you are going to absolutely own everyone in your first 10 or so real games - there are so many players who jump straight into the game without even playing one bot game that its just silly. If you have played around 100 games (even if they are versus bots) you will have such an easy time. (I personally played 4 or 5 bot games as lich and lion, and I still had a very easy time of it (having never played a MOBA before)) - so dont be nervous!!! (obviously there is the odd Smurf or person who has played millions of hours of LOL,Hon/the original Dota but most people hadn't (in my personal experience).